NOTE: It is ironic that this is one of my most outdated pages. It was also one of my first posts when I started this website in 2003. I have learned a great deal since then, and updating this page is very much on my to-do list. Update: June 4, 2011. New photos above - more age appropriate. The one of Thomas was taken just before he left for the Far East. The second is of Lydia not long after the birth of their first child.Update: Feb 17, 2014. I have just posted a piece on my blog about Thomas JACKSON's 1864 trip to Hong Kong.

THEIR NINE CHILDREN:

Kathleen McCullagh JACKSON, born 1872, married Albert Maitland Tabor.
Edith Bradford JACKSON, born May 27, 1874. Died September 7, 1874.
Amy Oliver JACKSON, born May 27, 1874, married John Henry Lloyd.Thomas Dare
JACKSON, born June 14, 1876, married Mary Lillian Vera Massy Lloyd.
Beatrice Minnie Shrieve JACKSON, born December 19, 1879, married Raymond
John Marker.
George Julius JACKSON, born June 4, 1883, married Nesta Katherine Barclay.
Dorothy St. Felix JACKSON, born 26 July 1887, partner Dorothy Fitch.
Walter David Russell JACKSON, born March 8, 1890, married Kathleen Hunter
Claude Stewart JACKSON, born January 30, 1892, married Laura Emily Pearson.

NOTE: I have barely begun the research on
Sir Thomas JACKSON’s early life and will have to await my
trip to Ireland and to the HSBC archives in London later this fall
(2003). Fortunately, much of JACKSON’s later life, especially
his time with the Hongkong Shanghai Bank, is well documented.

My starting point for this story was a clipping of an obituary, published
in an unnamed paper (possibly The Newry Reporter) and saved by my grandmother,
Jeannie BROWN (Her husband –Thompson
BROWN - was one of Sir Thomas’ many nephews). This obituary
claims that Sir Thomas was “educated at Morgan School by private
tuition” (whatever that means). At the time of his attendance this
school was housed at Castleknock – a suburb about 8 miles out of
Dublin. The former building was totally ruined about 25 years ago and
there is hardly any trace of it now. The school itself has since amalgamated
with The King’s Hospital School.

Photo of Morgan's Gate Lodge, built
in 1812.Morgan's School was first opened in 1813 for boys only and was
for the purposes of educating the children of "poor reduced
Protestant parents". Why this was Sir Thomas Jackson's parent's
choice of school is puzzling, given their relative financial comfort.

Although Sir Thomas spent most of his childhood at the family home at
Urker, just outside the southern Armagh town of Crossmaglen, he was in
fact born in Carrigallen, Co. Leitrim where his parents were residing
at the time (SOURCE: Mary Cumiskey, Sir Thomas JACKSON Journal of the
Creggan Local History Society).

This photo in the family collection and
also in The 1990 Journal of the Creggan Local History Society.

Urker Lodge, Thomas JACKSON’s childhood home, had been owned by
the JACKSONs since at least the time of his grandmother, who is first
on record as owning the property in 1828 (Tithe Composition Book, Creggan
Parish). By the time Sir Thomas was born, his widowed grandmother still
owned 59 acres at Urker, a reasonably substantial farm for the times.
It must have taken some skill and perseverance for her to hang on to it.
There are records that at the end of a long lease in December 1846 (two
years after the birth of her grandson, Thomas), she was dispossessed of
this farm. Public feeling, it seems, was on their side. They had been
on the land for at least four generations since Sir Thomas’s great-great-grandparents
George JACKSON
& Margaret O'LAUGHLIN had settled there sometime between 1737 and
1745. Somehow, his grandmother managed to hang on to the farm, or some
semblance of it. By 1864, Thomas’ father David is shown to be the
owner of lands in both Urker and Liscalgat. Family letters from subsequent
years show land ownership and entitlement to be a sticky wicket and it
is certain that Thomas would have grown up steeped in the climate of talk
of all this.

By the time that Sir Thomas was six years old, his grandmother had handed
the running of the farm over to his father and the family had moved back
to Urker Lodge. The JACKSON family roots in this area were clearly deep
and through various intermarriages, the family was well connected, particularly
in the Presbyterian community. One of his uncles, Rev.
Daniel Gunn BROWNE – a larger than life figure in the area -
baptized him and his brothers and sisters in the nearby First Newtownhamilton
Presbyterian Church. (A memorial window in his memory, however, is in
the Creggan Anglican Church).NOTE: Plan to photograph this and more
when I visit in September.

Mary Cumiskey points out the dangers in constructing biographies by believing
every document we find. An anecdote from the Edward Richardson papers
maintains:

... an English cattle dealer bought cattle from David JACKSON in
Cross’ fair. David had his young son Andy with him and afterwards,
over a drink at Hale’s pub (now O’Donnell’s) the dealer
offered to take Andy back to London and get him a job in a bank. David
let Thomas go instead and this is how he got started in his banking
career. (NOTE: this “Andy” would be Andrew
Coulter Bradford JACKSON)

This story is all very well, but our man JACKSON actually made his banking
start in Belfast.

Two extensive histories of the HSBC are invaluable for understanding
the contributions and life of Sir Thomas. The most extensive is a four
volume history by Frank H.H. King, The History of the Hongkong and
Shanghai Banking Corporation. Highly recommended. The second is a
more anecdotal history Wayfoong, by Maurice Collis. The latter
book was first commissioned by the management of HSBC in 1961 in order
to be ready to commemorate the hundredth anniversary in March 1965. For
the casual reader, it is the more accessible of the two books but by its
very nature it covers less territory than the first.

Since the publication of these two books, the HSBC has had the vision
to undertake much more organization of its historical records and archives.
The staff at these archives have been extremely helpful and I look forward
to researching there in person (albeit briefly) in the foreseeable future.

In his book, King described Sir Thomas’ father as “four generations
from a landholder who around 1750 had lost all (and) was a teacher in
the local school.” His mother was described as “an educated
woman of Huguenot ancestry”. These bare facts are true as far as
they go but their story and the story of their ancestors encompasses a
good many more twists and turns than that. In the next few months, the
family pages and histories posted on this site will flesh out a good deal
more of this rich family saga.

When it comes to JACKSON himself, what we do know of his early professional
years is that at age 19 (in 1860), he began his banking career with the
Belfast Branch of the Bank of Ireland. Four years later, he accepted a
three-year position in the Far East as a clerk with the Agra and Masterman’s
Bank. It must have been a heady time for a 23 year old who had lived most
of his life in small-town rural Ireland (Crossmaglen, Co. Armagh) and
who had been raised in a very close knit – perhaps even suffocating
- Presbyterian farming family.

When JACKSON made his first trip to Hong Kong, travellers from Britain
had three choices – all of which involved hopes for good weather.
The first route took at least 55 days and involved travelling on the
P
& O line. Since the Suez canal was not yet open, passengers sailed
first to Alexandria, then took a train to Suez, and then another liner
from there. The second choice was Alfred Holt’s line of steamers.
They had steam ships that took at least 66 days to sail all around
the Cape. The third alternative was to travel by the Pacific Mail Steamship
Co. This route from Liverpool or Southampton to Hong Kong via Panama
took about 54 days. No matter how travellers got to Hong Kong from
Great Britain, it took an additional five days travel to get to Shanghai.
These trips were not without their dangers.When he was signed with the Agra & Masterman's
bank, he was given funds to travel to Hong Kong on the overland route. This involved going overland from Port Said to Suez [Thanks to Robin Kinloch for that information].

JACKSON’s first choice of bank employment perhaps wasn’t
so propitious. The Agra & Masterman Bank folded within three years
of his arrival. It did at least mean that he had his foot in the door.
His second choice, the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank was unique. It was the
first bank operating in the Far East to be founded and headquartered in
the territory that it served (initially in Hong Kong). At the time, other
banks offering services in the Far East had been founded with their headquarters
in cities such as London. Their profits and dividends had generously flowed
out to wherever their home office was. Not uncommon, then or today. In
time, this outflow of capital from such regions became a liability to
the very operations that were supposedly being served.

It is perhaps helpful to think of banking in the mid-1800s as a new and
rapidly evolving system much as the Internet is in the late 20th century.
It was volatile and creative and the bottom lines were marked with scads
of winners and losers. Like the Internet, the banking systems were developing
means to move both information and money around and like the Internet,
once the systems were put in place even though they seemed self-evident,
they were previously inconceivable to all but geeks and visionaries. Sir
Thomas JACKSON was one of the latter.

Understanding how commercial money was handled in the Far East up until
the early 1800s makes sense of many of the wars and military manoeuvres
of the time. Up until then, trade had been mostly facilitated by agency
houses which were more like trading and financing departments operating
within the corporations which they served. They had their limits. The
tea trade would be a good example.

In the late 1700s, 15 million pounds of tea was exported from China
to England. In the early years of tea trade, the various English importing
companies paid for it by selling silver. This worked rather well when
few people drank tea, but became increasingly problematic as tea caught
on. The trouble with this method was that the importing company had to
buy the silver in the first place before they could buy the tea. This
put British traders at a trading disadvantage. Intolerable. Eventually,
being part of the British Empire, they hit on a much more effective commodity
for them to trade: Opium.

Since, the British East India Company was well established as a trading
company in India and it exerted political control over much of India,
then the British (at arms length) could grow the opium in India, sell
it for silver and then trade the silver for the tea. Not that all good
ideas are this simple and this one was no exception. The problem was that
England did not have the same level of effective political control over
China that it did over India. It was also the case that China had laws
that not only banned the importation of opium, but also that these laws
were beginning to be effectively enforced, at least with respect to trade
with the British. This meant that the British methods of transportation
and selling, obviously illegal, had to operate covertly, under a system
of bribes and coercion, not an unknown practice – but costly.

Then, the worst fears of the tea importers materialized. In the mid-1800s,
the Chinese Emperor stiffened up his enforcement and destroyed massive
amounts of British opium. The British behaved as empires always do when
their will is thwarted - they brought in the military. The warships arrived
in Hong Kong in June of 1840 (a year before the birth of Sir Thomas JACKSON)
and the British sent a letter to the Emperor demanding not only Free Trade
(this has an eerily modern ring to it) but also compensation for the British
opium that had been destroyed by the Emperor’s agent, Lin Tse Hsu.

When the desired response wasn’t forthcoming, the British attacked
the forts at Canton in 1841. Once the British forces prevailed, as they
had the maritime and military technological edge, the Chinese were forced
to cede the Island of Hong Kong so the British could henceforth both settle
and trade without interference.

After even more military muscle on the part of the British, the Treaty
of Nanking was signed in August 1842. This gave the British nearly everything
they had been pressing for during the past 150 years. The ports were now
open to them; foreigners were now free to buy and sell in an open market
(without having to go through Chinese agents and officials); and tariffs
and other duties had become both fixed and transparent. The British military
had won all that the commercial wings of its Empire had demanded and the
stage was now set for the future successes of the Hongkong Shanghai Bank.

As mentioned earlier, British trade in China before these military interventions
had been handled by “agency houses” which were really nothing
more than the banking departments of the large merchant firms which operated
in the region. In the 1840's and 1850's with Hong Kong now under British
control, these agency houses could happily set up their businesses secure
in the knowledge that they wouldn’t have to face either legal or
military interference from the Chinese. Interestingly, now that their
nest had been made more comfortable, their next threat was from their
own people in the form of British “joint stock banks”. The
Agra and Masterman Bank, where Sir Thomas first worked in the region,
was one such example. These kinds of banks, which were based either in
India or else in London - with Indian trade being the mainstay of their
business – were keen to ensure that the business which had traditionally
belonged to the agency houses would now accrue to them. Good plan.

Had these “joint stock banks” succeeded, it would have meant
that all the banks operating in Hong Kong would have been treated in the
same way that branch plants are treated everywhere. Good for the stockholders
in London and crummy for the support of local business enterprises in
Hongkong. Left unchecked, it would have resulted in the decapitalization
of the region. The business community of Hong Kong was clear on this score
and they didn’t like it one bit. They wanted their own bank, not
one like the Bank of China which was registered in London and which had
made only a quarter of the controlling shares available to local residents.
They wanted a bank where the benefits would clearly flow to their own
community and where control would be both local and effective. In short,
they wanted something like what the HSBC would become from the day of
its inception.

Sir Thomas JACKSON recalled the specifics of how all this came about
in a speech that he gave at the banquet after the annual meeting of the
Hongkong Shanghai Bank in 1908:

The start of the Hongkong Bank was very peculiar. It arose out
a tremendous speculative boom that existed in Bombay in 1864, when financial
companies, land reclamation companies, banks, and all sorts of things
were started at a tremendous pace. But the good people of Bombay, in
addition to exploiting their own country, cast their eyes towards China
and said ‘we are going to start a Bank of China with its head
office in Hong Kong’. Well, the good people in Hong Kong did not
like this prospect at all. They thought that such a bank would be controlled
from Bombay and it could not possibly be a local bank at all. So they
determined that they would forestall their Bombay friends and form a
bank of their own. Sir Thomas Sutherland, then Mr. Sutherland, was the
Superintendent of the P & O Company. He and the late Mr. Pollard
took the lead in this matter; went vigorously to work, and formed a
provisional committee of fifteen. This provisional committee finally
launched The Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation with a capital
of five million dollars, commencing business in March 1865. The first
manager in Hong Kong was Mr. Victor Kresser, and the first in Shanghai
Mr. David Maclean. Mr. Kresser was a marvellously clever man, of immense
energy, and it would have been impossible to find anyone better able
to start a venture of the kind. He was full of zeal and threw himself
heart and soul into the work, established agencies all over the East,
and everything went fairly prosperously for the balance of the year
1865.

One year after the formation of the HSBC and two years after the start
of JACKSON’s contract as a clerk with the Agra and Masterman’s
Bank, a bear raid on Agra’s shares caused a suspension of its business.
Not being the kind of person who was any good at twiddling his thumbs
with nothing to do, JACKSON requested to be released from his contract
and began work the very next day with the HSBC, August 6, 1866. His timing
was fortuitous, his judgement impeccable.

Within a year, he had been promoted from agent at Hankow to Accountant
at Shanghai - a position which carried significant managerial responsibilities.
His abilities must have been exceptional as there were at least two others
who were senior to him and who would surely have expected to be in the
running for the job. (p 242, King) JACKSON’s new salary was close
to 60% higher than what it had been at the Agra and Masterman’s
Bank. Clearly a good move.

By 1870, he was appointed to the post of Manager of the Yokohama office.
This branch had just opened four years earlier, in 1866, the year JACKSON
had first arrived in the region. At this time, the British community in
Yokohama was still very small. Fifty British residents were recorded as
living there in 1861 and the British population would have included about
400 non-military people at most by the time that JACKSON arrived.

In 1872, halfway through his tenure at Yokohama, JACKSON was offered
the job as manager of the Shanghai Branch. This was a plum. This job was
the second most important posting in the HSBC and Sir Thomas would have
had intimate knowledge of this branch from having served there as an accountant
from 1866-70. Even so, he turned the offer down, feeling that the successful
operation of the Yokohama branch still required his presence.

Again, this was fortuitous. There was a lot of action going on in Yokohama
and a lot of it involved trading in silver, a skill that would stand JACKSON
in good stead in the years to come. This was also the same year that the
HSBC had opened an agency at Osaka to facilitate bullion operations with
Japanese merchants in connection with the Mint which had been set up there.
In his time there, JACKSON formed lasting bonds with the important people
there and performed well in his relations with the Mint, the HSBC, the
Japanese government and the merchants. (NOTE: Sir Thomas’s brother,
David JACKSON, arrived in Hong Kong six years after Sir Thomas, but even
though he was well enough regarded to be later honoured by the Emperor,
it wasn’t until 1893 that he became manager of the Yokohama Branch)

Sir Thomas served as the Yokohama manager for four years, until 1874.
Fortunately for him, even though the population was small (we’re
talking less than a thousand people), the opportunities for romance were
not (and may have contributed to his decision not to relocate to Shanghai!).
On September 19th, 1871, one year after moving to Yokohama, Sir Thomas
married Amelia Lydia Dare, resident in Yokohama and the daughter of George
Julius Dare of Dorset, a Captain in the British navy. (NOTE: Seven years
later, her brother - A.H. Dare - would be the last “junior”
to be recruited from the East, rather than from London. He served at Yokohama
in 1878 as a junior and then as sub-manager until 1893 when he retired
due to ill health and was pensioned off.)

Sir Thomas’ bride, Amelia Lydia Dare had roots in the area that
had been put down long before he arrived on the scene. Her father was
a well-known “character” in Singapore. He had been a navigating
officer in the navy, had married at the Cape and had many business interests
on the side (as such “masters” in the Navy often did). His
maternal grandfather, Mr. Julius, had helped him build a vessel of his
own and he afterwards built others for his expanding business interests.
At one time he was conducting trade with China on three vessels fully
owned by himself. His wife, Sarah Strieve Parke, clearly no shrinking
violet, would often be left with the children as he headed off on his
long voyages to conduct his business. On one such instance in 1841, he
passed through Singapore on his way from Bombay and left his wife on shore.
A full account of The
Pirates & Mrs. Dare of Singapore is gleaned from An Anecdotal
History of Old Times in Singapore and is worth the retelling if only
to give a bit of a sense of the family that Sir Thomas married into and
the risks faced by the expatriate community at the time.

Clearly, Thomas JACKSON had chosen a wife, the second youngest of nine
children, who knew full well the risks and pleasures and customs of living
in this part of the world. Her father, George Julius Dare, had first sailed
from Calcutta to China in 1823 (p 604 Anecdotal History of Old Times in
Singapore) and stayed active there for more than a quarter century.

From her father’s experience, Lydia would also have known what
it was like to have a family business collapse after a breach of trust.
In the year preceding his death and while on leave in England, her father
had left his ship chandler and commission agent business in the hands
of a trusted employee who siphoned its resources into his own pockets
and drove it into bankruptcy. Even though Sir Thomas would never meet
Dare Sr., who died a year later in 1856 in England at age 50, his contacts
and those of his three remaining sons would have been part of the network
of connections that enriched his success.

In spite of George Sr.’s death in England in 1855, the rest of
the Dare family stayed resident in the Far East. The eldest son, George
Dare, is recorded in the aftermath of Krakatoa (August 1883) as paddling
his canoe out into the harbour and bringing back pieces of pumice stone
“as big as a hat”. In the 1850s he and Julius were active
in amateur theatre in Singapore. Regrettably, Julius died suddenly of
cholera in 1879 in Yokohama and his mother, Sarah Strieve Dare, died five
days later.

By 1876 JACKSON was recognized as a hot young thing at the HSBC. He was
made Acting Manager on the basis of his abilities (and in spite of his
young age) and then in 1877 was made Chief Manager (the one year “probation”
likely to ensure that he would prove out). He was thirty-five years old,
had only ten years service in the HSBC but was a born financier. He was
known both for his charm and for his sincere concern for the people who
worked under him.

In a letter written a decade later by Charles ADDIS to his father Rev. Thomas ADDIS, we have a glimpse into how he was regarded by his staff:

What a fellow he is. Sound to the core. Straight in all his dealings;
honest to the backbone, and with all a heart as tender as a woman’s.
Fiery, if you like, but I don’t believe in a man who has not got
a temper. In fine it was a privilege to have received two years and
more under such a chief. I believe I am a better man from knowing him.
SOURCE: King, Vol. I, p318.

Again, JACKSON’s timing in 1876 was impeccable. He took over the
reins just after the bank had endured several losses (in the wake of a
serious depression in both China and England), the failure of a major
client and the questionable speculation by the Manager of the London Office
in Spanish bonds and South American railways. When he took over, the net
profits were less than half a million dollars. Some 26 years later, they
were nearly three million. Even more important though was the rise in
deposits in this time frame, from eleven million dollars to one hundred
million.

One of JACKSON’s first initiatives was to open a new branch in
Singapore in 1877. Singapore was his father-in-law’s old stomping
grounds and still home to several family members and friends. The prospects
for this new branch looked good. The Suez Canal had been opened in 1869
making the Straights of Malacca the main thoroughfare for steam vessels
sailing to China. Business was booming.

JACKSON’s second major coup was the relationship he nurtured with
Jardine, Matheson and Company. Before JACKSON’s tenure, there had
been a historical rift between the HSBC and Jardine Matheson and Company,
probably because HSBC had succeeded in winning business away from them.
JACKSON welcomed principals from Jardine Matheson and Company to serve
on the HSBC’s Board of Directors. This was the seed of a most profitable
relationship. By the end of the century, when the British & Chinese
Corporation that financed railway development in China was formed, Jardine
Matheson had secured the business of provisioning and construction of
the railway while HSBC supplied the financing. The end result was so successful
that HSBC was then able to finance the building of a new head office at
what would become the most prime real estate in Hong Kong.

Part of what fuelled the rise in the HSBC’s fortune was JACKSON’s
skill as a silver specialist and trader. China had been on the silver
standard for its currency at a time when the value of silver was plummeting.
One of JACKSON’s stated goals was to keep the bank “on an
even keel” which he did by keeping large silver deposits when almost
no else dared to, using them to make loans at a premium (because there
was no competition) and thereby being able to accept all the contracts
and advance loans which other companies couldn’t handle because
they didn’t have adequate reserves to cover them. In fact, he was
so good at this, he became known as “Lucky JACKSON”.

JACKSON’s luck, however, was always tempered by judgment. In these
boom times, he didn’t dramatically increase the overhead of operation
or the numbers of agencies and branches between Burma and Japan, as a
less prudent person might have been tempted to. He ran a tight ship. At
a time when the costs of management at competing London and Indian banks
were in the range of 50-60%of profit, the HSBC kept their overhead down
to 42%.

In the decades that followed, the Chinese government became more and
more reliant on the HSBC to assist them with loans that enabled them to
defend their borders against incursions by the Russians and Japanese.
At the close of the century, China’s dependence on the HSBC was
a key factor in the their administration redrawing the map of Hong Kong
to expand its territory from 32 to 398 1/4 square miles (thereby including
the lands around Kowloon) with a 99-year lease on these lands being granted
to the British Crown.

JACKSON’s final achievement was to put the Hong Kong currency on
a sounder footing by reviving the idea of using the British dollar as
the standard currency of trade. As a result, the British dollar became
the most trusted currency throughout the region at the time.

Throughout decades of revolutions, military incursions and political
instabilities of nearly every sort imaginable, JACKSON continued to succeed
in his goal of keeping the Bank “on an even keel”. At his
last annual meeting of the Bank in Hong Kong, he received a thunderous
ovation for doing more than any other manager had done and who also, when
times were bad, had come out of retirement to rescue them one more time.
A man who had raised the Bank to the proud position it now occupied.

When JACKSON retired in May of 1902, he was granted an honorarium of
£100.000.00 and was made Chairman of the London Committee at a salary
of £1,500.00 per annum. For comparison’s sake, this amount
was equivalent to what would be given at the time to a Governor of an
Indian Province. [NOTE: In today’s pounds, this would mean £6,269,863.00
for the honorarium and £94,047.95 per annum. In contemporary Canadian
dollars, the amounts would be $14,229,454.00 and $213,441.82 – and
this at a time long before our current levels of executive compensation
were in place.]

On the 24th of February 1906, a bronze statue of JACKSON facing the Bank
was unveiled in Statue Square. It is still the only statue in “Statue
Square”. On his retirement, one of the many fine speeches to send
him off was the following tribute from the Chinese merchants of Hong Kong:

Sir, On the eve of your retirement from business to your country,
happy and crowned with honour and glory as the result of your special
abilities and merits, we, the Chinese merchants of Hong Kong, as a token
of our respect for your sterling qualities and of our gratitude for
your kindness and sociability, beg most respectfully to dedicate to
you the following metaphor, composed of four characters to mark our
everlasting affection.
“He is the man of whom the poem ‘Autumn Water’ reminds
one.”
Written on a lucky day in May 1902.
A gift from the Chinese merchants of Hong Kong who present it to you
with a graceful bow
SOURCE: Wayfoong.

JACKSON was knighted on July 8th, 1899 and three years later received
the additional honour of Baronet (August 4, 1902) Even though Sir Thomas
chose to retire at Stansted House, Essex, (where he bought and resided
on an estate of a hundred acres) he didn’t forget his roots and
visited Urker frequently where he was well known for his generosity, several
accounts which survive. (SOURCE: Edward Richardson papers quoted by Mary
Comiskey):

It is said that he never gave less than a sovereign to a poor
person and each year, before he returned from holiday, he left a jug
of sovereigns with his sister, Mrs. Gilmore, to distribute to the needy
of Creggan Parish.
(NOTE: This “Mrs. Gilmore” would be Thomas’ sister
Sarah JACKSON who married Eliezer GILMORE and whose son Samuel
GILMORE also worked for the HSBC and died in Hongkong in 1942 when
overrun by Japanese soldiers in WWII.)

Sir Thomas liked to visit the families of his workers. In 1912,
he called with Mary Ann's mother (she then lived up the Claranagh Road)
and he said: "Marian, this house is getting too small for your
family. We will build you a house at the cross-roads and we will call
it `John's Rock' ". The rent was agreed at 1 penny per week. He
there and then went to see Keenans, builders, gave them the contract
and the house was ready in a year.

Mary Ann remembers her father and the other workers in Urker going
up to Cavananor to help with the spring and summer work. Sir Thomas
had a fairly large farm - about 200 acres - in Cavananor. There was
a land-steward who lived in the house and some workers on the farm but,
at busy times, the workers from Urker helped out. From local knowledge,
it appears that the Land Commission took over the land and divided it
among four families.
(NOTE: This is the farm alluded to in a letter from Eliza (Gilmore)
JACKSON – wife of Thomas’ brother Andrew
Coulter Bradford JACKSON - in 1891 telling the legal battles over
land owned by Samuel BRADFORD. In 1822, lands in Cavananore were owned
by Andrew BRADFORD)

Cumiskey also shares a story transcribed from one of Michael J. Murphy's
manuscripts (Ms. 976) in the Department of Irish Folklore, University
College, Dublin,of a recording he made of Mary Daly:

The JACKSONs that time was big people out there an' there was this
oul woman was nursin' JACKSON - it was him was the one was very charitable.
He went out to China. It was in he's house I seen the first Chinese
woman ever I seen. She was in Cross' with him an' she'd be only that
height (maybe four feet) an' the lovliest wee feet on her an' two pigtails
down her back - an' very sallow.

This woman in May Daly’s description would have been “Ming”
- the children’s nurse.

But this oul woman that used to nurse JACKSON before he went to
China, or was fit to go - she went dark (blind) an' he used to lift
the beads for her an' I mind them sayin' that every Sunday he would
bring her down the Monug Road - that's a back way to JACKSON's - to
Mobane. He'd take her down this road, they sayed, till she be to hear
the bell ringin' in Mobane Chapel an' she'd say her beads there. JACKSON
was out in Shanghai - isn't that in China - this time an' he was great
for charity. But wherever this boat was goin' he stayed back to give
out this charity to these poor Chinese at the corner an' they were callin'
to him from the boat to come on, but it seems he took no heed of them.
Now, he was a great man for charity. But the boat was lost anyhow with
all hands. JACKSON said it was this oul woman's prayers that saved him.
Now, when he come to Cross'- and I mind it meself - they were all goin'
to him for charity an' it's up the avenue they be to go an' collect
there. They made him a baronet after. An' this Mission come to Cross'
an' that was the time they preached agin them goin' to Protestant houses.
An' mind you JACKSON had it first thing next mornin' an' he told them
to go to their own sort for charity. That's what stopped JACKSON's charity
in Cross'.....".

During the later years of Sir Thomas' life, Mary
GRIFFIN - his sister Mrs. Griffin, lived in Urker Lodge, under the
financial care of Sir Thomas who also employed a companion for her, a
Miss O'Hare. (NOTE: This “Mrs. Griffin” was the widow of Frederick
Richard GRIFFIN. Her first husband was William MENARY and their child
Mary married James “Jemmie” WRIGHT who bought Urker Lodge
in 1935 and whose descendent Major WRIGHT lives nearby in Gilford Castle.)

At Crossmaglen, other than Urker Lodge and the family graveyard, Sir
Thomas JACKSON is still remembered in a memorial window at Creggan Church
and in a display of the Creggan Local History Society that includes amongst
other things, “The JACKSON Bell”. The story of this bell begins
in 1865 when the local landlord, Thomas Ball, installed a fake clock on
the Marketplace which he had built in 1863 –just around the time
that JACKSON first left for work in the Far East. This dummy clock became
an object of much derision, mocked in local ballads:

Your clumsy clocks must follow time, both minute-hand and hour,
But this great work has stopped time’s course, and proved its
magic power;
Now, sneer not cynic – ‘tis the truth – time has
not moved since when
This clock was placed amongst us in the town of Crossmaglen.

Forty years after its installation, Sir Thomas returned to his native
town and on May 1st, 1903 replaced this inoperative clock with a fine
mechanism, reputedly of solid gold and silver. Sadly, on July 1974, the
Marketplace was hit with explosives and it and the clock were demolished
- another sad relic of the times of “The Troubles”. On September
1989, the bell of the clock was restored and is now on display at the
Visitor’s Centre at Creggan Church - a historical display committed
to healing the rifts between classes and faiths which have so dogged the
history of Ireland, a purpose that were Sir Thomas still amongst us, he
would likely have approved (and even funded!)